After five trials and 42 years, a Norristown man was sentenced to life in prison for killing his girlfriend
Robert Fisher's decades-long series of appeals and overturned convictions in Linda Rowden's death ended Wednesday, with a mandatory life sentence.
After four decades of grief and anger, Chris DiDomenico on Wednesday got to tell Robert Fisher what he took from her in the split-second pull of a trigger one afternoon in 1980.
“You’ve devastated a family and continue to do so, and you show no remorse,” DiDomenico told Fisher during his sentencing in the murder of her sister, Linda Rowden. “You’re an animal and you deserve to be in a cage. Enjoy your life in a cage.”
Moments later, she watched in a Norristown courtroom as Fisher was sentenced to life in prison by Montgomery County Judge Todd Eisenberg.
Fisher, 76, was convicted of first-degree murder in Rowden’s death in December, putting an end to one of the longest-running criminal prosecutions in Montgomery County history. A jury took just 30 minutes to reach that verdict during Fisher’s fifth trial, solidifying his fate after decades of appeals and overturned convictions due to legal errors by judges or prosecutors.
His fourth trial a year earlier had ended in a deadlock after one juror refused to cooperate with his colleagues.
Throughout, Fisher asserted his innocence and continued to do so Wednesday.
He declined to speak in court beyond telling the judge that he would need the transcripts from his trial, presumably for an appeal. Afterward, as sheriff’s deputies led him out of the courtroom, Fisher told reporters to “give my finger to the family,” a reference to an earlier assertion by DiDomenico that he had gestured toward her with his middle finger during his trial last year.
Prosecutors said Fisher killed Rowden, 26, his girlfriend, as she drove him and another man through Norristown in July 1980. The motive for the killing, they said, was Rowden’s cooperation with detectives investigating the murder of a local drug dealer — a crime in which Fisher was the prime suspect.
Their case was supported by Richard Mayo, the other passenger in the car, who witnessed the shooting and cooperated with detectives as they pieced together Rowden’s final hours.
But Mayo’s testimony was just part of what First Assistant District Attorney Ed McCann called “a web of evidence” against Fisher: Ammunition found in Fisher’s apartment had been altered in the same, specific way as the bullets found in Rowden’s body; a Norristown beat cop saw Fisher and Rowden arguing minutes before the shooting; and two days before Rowden’s death, police had issued a warrant for Fisher’s arrest for assaulting her inside his apartment.
After the sentencing, McCann said he was satisfied that Rowden’s family had been able to “express the anger and frustration they have been dealing with for 42, almost 43 years now.”
And he also pushed back against criticism he said his office has received for pursuing the case against Fisher despite his advanced age.
“Yes, he’s in his 70s, but what’s been borne out here time and time again is that he’s unrepentant,” McCann said. “He’s always blamed other people for what has happened. Someone like that, without any type of remorse for what they did, has no hope for rehabilitation.”
» READ MORE: From 2021: "40 years later, a Montgomery County woman shares her grief as her sister’s alleged killer goes on trial"
During Fisher’s trial last year, his attorney, James Lyons, tried to cast doubt on Mayo, the prosecution’s prime witness, calling him a self-serving liar. He said Mayo only cooperated with police in exchange for reduced penalties in his own criminal cases.
Lyons said after Wednesday’s sentencing that Fisher was planning to appeal his conviction. He said evidence related to the shooting Rowden had been speaking to police about was improperly introduced during the trial, among other errors.